Human Transit

email of the week: should blue lines have blue buses?

From a longtime Canberra-based reader:

In your latest post on [San Francisco] bus wrap art, you refer to your fondness for colour-coding of buses, etc for different service.  For instance in Canberra, this would see the Red Rapid using red coloured buses, the Blue Rapid using Blue coloured buses, and so on.

[JW:  The Red Rapid and Blue Rapid are the two frequent rapid corridors that connect the major dense nodes of Canberra to each other, with widely-spaced stops.  They are the top priority for bus lanes and other speed/reliability improvements.]

 

Which I personally think is great in promotion of the service, making the service stand out - it also helps give a rapid bus (which isn't run solely on transitways) an identity akin to a light rail line.

 

However, I've always found that schedulers don't like it as it limits the general number of vehicles available to run a network. It also removes the ability to use a vehicle in one service type and have it continue its run on a rapid route - thereby removing a connection for some passengers  ...  And I'm sure there's a whole stack of other reasons which schedulers and operators will through up in relation to this.

 

So, I guess the question is, given that this is more of an aesthetic improvement ... do the benefits measure up to the costs?

Seoul, South Korea went a long way with this idea, branding all their buses with four colors that indicate different functions in the network (Trunk, Branch, Rapid, or Circulator).  Paint schemes are often used to distinguished closed Bus Rapid Transit [BRT] systems (systems where buses do not flow through onto other corridors, but remain confined within the BRT infrastructure.)

  
Los Angeles Metro has painted their fleet two colors, red for Rapid and orange for Local.  Even with two colors, the "Local" is problematic.  Orange really means "everything but Rapid," including limited-stop and freeway-express services that wouldn't satisfy anyone's definition of a "local."

And even so, sometimes you see an orange bus on a Rapid line, or vice versa.  I've never seen a painted color scheme where this never occurred; sometimes the dispatcher needs a red bus and all he has are orange ones.  Sometimes an orange bus breaks down and the nearest available spare is red.  You'd rather we didn't send out a bus at all? 

I do think, however, we could be doing much more with signage to highlight color-based brands. 

canberra: a new circulator network for the national core

Washington DC has its downtown circulator, and now the Washington DC of Australia, Canberra, has one too. What's more, my clients in Canberra created their circulator for almost zero in new operating costs, using one of my favorite planning tricks. Starting next week, four color-coded lines will provide frequent links among all the major tourist attractions, government buildings, universities, commercial districts, and interchange points in the dense core areas of the Australian capital.

For the whole brochure on the circulator, click here: PDF

Where did all this new service come from? Most of it was already there, but was presented as a tangle of several infrequent lines.  These were just too hard to figure out for someone making quick trips around the core.  Short trips are very time-sensitive, and that includes the time it takes to figure them out.  So circulators have to be frequent and simple.

For several years, Canberra has been discussing options for creating a shuttle system to link these core destinations, but they could never find the money.  Instead, I suggested that we look at whether bus service that's already there could be branded to form legible and frequent circulator lines.  It turned out to be possible, with only slight service additions and some careful revision of timetables.

The Gold Line and Green Line are each created out of two existing routes that are every 20-30 minutes when separate but that combine to provide high frequency when running together.  When they're separate, they're just Routes 2, 3, 4, and 5, each doing its own business. But when Route 2 and 3 are together, that common segment is branded as the Gold Line. Likewise, the segment where 4 and 5 are on top of each other will be called the Green Line.

Signage and new marketing will highlight that you can use these colored lines to circulate around the core, and you don't have to care what the line numbers are. People don't have to remember that to get from the City station to the National Library they need the 2 or the 3. Instead, they can just remember the Gold Line.

Obviously, a combined frequency of 15-20 minutes is not enough for a true circulator, and the goal is to get to 10 or better as demand grows.  Now that Canberra has the color-based brands, future planners can easily decide to design other lines to flow through the branded segments, thus contributing to the combined frequency.  In many cities, there are situations where six more more half-hourly lines are effectively right on top of each other for a long distance; those are ideal candidates for a color-based brand that combines them into a (possibly very frequent) shuttle.

At the same time, Canberra is re-branding the two existing Rapid bus corridors as the Blue Rapid and Red Rapid. The Red Rapid happens to be one frequent line with no variants, but the Blue Rapid is formed of many overlaid lines, all numbered in the 300s, that do different things on outer branches but all run along the same Rapid segment linking several major town centers.  Together, the Red and Blue Rapids will form the frequent rapid-transit backbone of Canberra's all-bus network. As it happens, they also link some useful dots within the core area, so they're on the core map as well. 

This branding technique is often useful in relatively small cities that have a few strong frequent corridors.  I first suggested it in Bellingham, Washington, a university town north of Seattle, and this shelter displays one of the results.   Again, the Blue Line consists of a big pile of three-digit route numbers, but now nobody has to remember those numbers to navigate this high-demand corridor that runs through the university and into downtown.

Often in small cities, these frequent segments are served by several different routes overlaid, but the pile of route numbers makes the service seem complex.  The color brands let people ignore that complexity and see the frequency clearly instead.  And since frequency is the foundation of freedom for transit riders, transit agencies that want to be instruments of freedom should make it as visible as possible!

canberra: public radio interview on transit in australia's capital

Last month I did a radio interview for Alex Sloan of ABC 666 Canberra (the main public radio station in Australia's national capital) on the broad future of pubic transit in that city, along with Monash University Professor Graham Currie.  Much of what was said, especially about light rail and bus rapid transit, is true of any low-density New World city with populations under 1 million.  ABC has now posted an MP3 of the interview here.

Amusing background: I did the interview on a hallway phone next to the elevators on the top floor of the Portland (Oregon) Hilton, looking out at the fall colors of Portland's west hills.  I was at the hotel for the Railvolution conference, but wasn't a hotel guest, and they'd already made clear their boundaries by not letting me use the hotel's wi-fi.  Taking a call on a hallway phone can feel downright furtive in this wireless world. 

canberra: "they only refer to buses"

Transit debates often get stuck because the word we need doesn't exist.  And as longtime readers of this blog will know, I'd really like there to be a word that means "transit vehicle, maybe on rails and maybe on tires" or "clearly a bus right now, but with the possibility of growing rails in the future."

But there isn't such a word.  So when I'm working in a city where the short-term reality is an all-bus system, and I talk about that system and our short-term plans for it, well, it's really hard not to use the word bus.  And when I want to help people visualize it, it's hard not to draw a picture of a bus. 

And when I do, rail advocates assume that means I'm expressing an opposition to rail, or perhaps just pandering to such feelings in my clients.  Here, for example, the latest blast from the head of the main light rail lobby group in Australia's capital city, Canberra, in a comment on the Canberra news blog RiotACT:

Although Mr Walker proclaims transport mode agnosticism, he is being paid by a pro-bus department ... . What do you think would happen to future work for his firm if he came out and said, replace buses with light rail on the rapid route where the demand warrants this modal change.

I have heard the [local government] policy people report on their long term plans based on the ‘Canberra Transport Plan’. They only refer to buses.

Actually, I'm being paid (and modestly) by a department that's trying to plot a rational course into a sustainable transport future, for a city of 345,000 people who live mostly at low densities with an abundant road network.  The transit system is not yet at a scale or intensity where it needs the capacity that light rail would offer, nor is there much near-term prospect of funding for it.  Light rail could happen, and I certainly don't oppose it, but as I said over and over in Canberra's Strategic Plan process, if you wait for light rail, you will miss a lot of other opportunities to improve transit mobility, and to encourage more transit-friendly urban form.

So to improve public transit in Canberra, the government is moving forward with a plan to improve the buses.   Not because they love buses, but because (a) they have buses and (b) they need to move forward. 

And so, to talk about that, they need to say the word "bus" a lot, and even draw pictures of buses. And yes, if your conception of transit begins with an absolute division between a bus world and a rail world, then officials who do that are going to sound to you like bus advocates. 

But if you call them that, you're projecting your scheme onto them.  Not everyone lives in a bus-vs-rail world.  The experts and officials who say bus a lot may well be true bus enthusiasts, but they may also be people like me who just want to get on with the work of developing good transit, and who therefore reach for whatever tool will best do the job at hand.

on pedestrian malls: look to australia

Why are pedestrian streets in commercial areas so common and successful in Europe, but not in North America?

A while back, a reader emailed me to ask this.  He observed that even in Vancouver, it's hard to get a pedestrian mall going:

And why does a downtown core as densely populated as Vancouver only have one temporary pedestrian area (part of Granville Street)? And could Vancouver make the main shopping street (Robson Street) a pedestrian corridor like many UK towns and cities do (such as Birmingham, Glasgow, Reading, Bournemouth, and many more)?

I note you commented on Price Tags about Granville Mall earlier this year, and Price Tags has a recent article on the removal of a pedestrian area in Raleigh, North Carolina. Have you any further thoughts on these issues?

First of all, don't compare North America to Europe.  The history and ambient density and urban momentum are all too different.  Compare North America to Australia, where the history and economics are similar but a cultural difference led to a different outcome.

In Australia, pedestrian malls are utterly routine.  I can't think of a major commercial center in any of Australia's major cities that doesn't have one or more pedestrian malls at its core, usually immediately adjacent to the rail transit station.  Even small cities in Australia -- 50,000 or smaller -- often have at least one small ped mall running perpendicular to the main traffic street, or what Aussies would call the "high street".  Many small suburban centers have their own.

Here's a random example that I happened to visit while thinking about the question.  It's the Lyneham commercial district in Canberra.  In Canberra's planning hierarchy, this is a third-order center, designed mostly to serve only its own local population of a few thousand people in a radius of under 2 km.  Lyneham does have a couple of cool businesses that draw from further away, notable Tilley's Restaurant and an adjacent cafe+gallery, the Front, that offers free Wi-fi (not yet routine in Australia).  But neither of these is on the pedestrian mall itself.  

The mall is a short segment running from the main street to the parking lot behind, where the main grocery store is located.  The mall itself is lined with absolutely ordinary small businesses: a chemist (pharmacy), a newsagent, a bakery, a butcher, a little cafe.

One side of the mall is a blank wall of the larger IGA grocery store, but that store's entrance is on the corner of the building in the distance, visible from both the parking lot behind the building and the pedestrian mall itself.  Australian planning almost never allows a grocery store to front onto a main street.  Instead, it's on the parking lot behind the commercial centre, typically with a pedestrian mall like this one linking it to the street itself, so that it's large drawing power helps to animate the mall and nurture the small business on it.  The grocery store's logo will usually be visible from the street, perhaps on the back or side of the building, but that's it.  Who needs the main grocery store to have a big sign on the main street?  Everyone knows where their grocery store is.

You may also notice that the shops on this mall mostly offer things that Americans expect to find in the grocery store itself: newspapers and magazines, a pharmacy, and a staffed butcher and bakery counter.  Larger grocery stores do include staffed meat counters, but they're usually still surrounded by separate shops offering the same thing.  Aussies like turning their shopping into a series of separate transactions with human beings.  They assume that they are getting better value, and especially better quality, from small merchants, whether it's a butcher, a baker, a fishmonger, or a specialist in fresh fruits and vegetables.

The newsagent is perhaps the most culturally alien feature of this street to North Americans.  There are no newspaper vending machines in Australia.  Everyone buys a newspaper from a newsagent, who also has magazines, snacks, stationery, and assorted goodies like bus tickets.  (There's the connection I needed!  Now I can discuss all this on a transit blog!)

If you're from North America, and haven't been to Australia, you won't believe how completely ordinary these little malls are.  Everyone expects to encounter one in a business district.  And because these are ordinary, larger ones in larger centers become ordinary too.  In the CBD of Canberra (metro area population about 400,000) there's a multi-block pedestrian quarter which includes one side of the main shopping mall.  Larger cities inevitably have larger and more elaborate ones, but the important thing about Australia is how utterly normal and widespread these small pedestrian malls are.

If there's an underlying cultural difference to explain this, it's probably that Australia never had a moment when (a) there were massive amounts of money and (b) building everything for cars seemed like the logical thing to do.  The US did have such a period, from 1945 until it started changing in the 70s.  To use Jane Jacobs's terms, Australia experienced "gradual money" in the postwar years, but it never had the "cataclysmic money" that enabled the US to transform itself suddenly into a car-dominated landscape.

Aussies love cars too, but they have continued to build incrementally on their older towns.  They've built plenty of suburban sprawl, but they almost never tried to retrofit old town centers to serve only cars.  Aussies also have planning habits that derive from the Garden City era of planning, roughly 1880-1920, because this is when much of Australia's old urban fabric was built. 

(By the way, two of the most important dates in Australian history are in this same period.  Australia was created as a nation with the act of Federation in 1901, and the nation's major holiday honoring military service is Anzac Day, which commemorates a battle in 1915.  Australia's sense of itself is rooted particularly in the Garden City period, which may be an ancillary reason that this period's planning values still rule.)

It's true that if you ask either Americans or Aussies where they would ideally want to live, you'll often hear "a small town."  In fact, Aussies and Americans both live in big cities because the economy requires it.  The ped mall can be an element of forming a sense of small town in a big city neighborhood, but that's more likely to work for Aussies because their memory of small towns is more vivid than that of Americans.  This, of course, is both a cause and an effect of the fact that they haven't destroyed them all. 

Ultimately, Australia's success lies in the fact that the transition from towns to cities was gradual, so  there wasn't as much forgetting as there was in North America.  Australian planners aren't necessarily more creative than North American ones.  But they do remember what a real town looks like, because such places are still all around them.  They probably shop in one themselves.

cul-de-sac hell and the radius of demand

This is interesting:

Research by Lawrence Frank, Bombardier Chair in Sustainable Transportation at the University of British Columbia, looks at neighborhoods in King County, Washington: Residents in areas with the most interconnected streets travel 26% fewer vehicle miles than those in areas with many cul-de-sacs. Recent studies by Frank and others show that as a neighborhood’s overall walkability increases, so does the amount of walking and biking—while, per capita, air pollution and body mass index decrease.

I especially appreciate this graphic, because it's a nice illustration of a crucial transit concept: the radius of demand:

(The image on the left happens to be Woodinville, a suburb of Seattle, while the one on the right is Seattle's Ballard district.  But they could be any comparison of c. 1950 and c. 1880 street networks in the New World.)

Imagine that the red dot in the center of these images was a rail rapid transit station, as these can generally draw walk trips from a radius of about 1 km.  Most planning maps that you see will simply draw a circle of 1 km radius around the station, and call that the "catchment" or market area of the station.  

A circular radius of demand is often called an "air distance," or as we used to say, "as the crow flies."  Humans, however, have to go around barriers.  These include not just major walls such as a freeway (the wide orange line in the left image) but also simply the absence of a path in the desired direction.  So the real radius of demand is defined by the network of streets and paths.  Actual walking distances along the road network are indicated in blue.  Until recently, you didn't see these diagrams often in planning studies, because walking paths were just too complicated to calculate.  Now, thanks to increasingly rich GIS databases of pedestrian networks, it's getting easier. 

The beauty of fine-grained grid street patterns (not to be confused with the beauty of transit network grids) lies in your ability to reach most of the area of the 1 km circle in a 1 km walk along the network.  We can't expect any neighborhood to offer a 1 km walking distance to any point on a 1 km circle.  (Such a goal would fill the entire area of the circle with needed walking paths, leaving no room for a city.)  But the classic grid structure of streets is remarkably good at maximizing the walk radius while still leaving space to build things.  In the image above, the walkable radius in the suburban cul-de-sac street pattern on the left is less than 30% of the area of the circle, while in the fine-grained inner city street grid on the right, it's 64% of the circle. 

Transit, in short, has a direct interest in steps to increase the permeability of the street network, steps that make a street network more like the map on the right and less like the one on the left, because such changes enlarge its market.  Cities that value transit (or walking or cycling for that matter) should be looking for strategic interventions where small additional segments of ped-bike path can dramatically shorten ped-bike distances and thus expand the actual walkable radius of demand around a transit station or stop.

Here's an example from Hayward, California, which I remember from my brief 1990 stint at AC Transit:

 

The triangle in the center is a large mobile home park.  It is about 750 m in extent from north to south, and bounded by the freeway on the west and a fenced drainage canal on the east.  The only street nearby on which you could run a reasonably frequent transit service is the east-west arterial on the bottom of the image (Industrial Parkway).  (The local bus system actually does something more complicated than this, but that's beside the point.  Clearly, if you were trying to run relatively fast and efficient bus routes, you'd stay on major arterials like Industrial Parkway, and focus on improving the pedestrian access there, rather than driving on much slower and more circuitous paths into the surrounding neighborhoods.)

At the very bottom of the triangle is a bridge over the canal.  My recollection is that in 1990, that bridge wasn't there.  Regardless of whether that's true, the point is that if the bridge weren't there, almost everyone in the mobile home park would be more than 400 m (1/4 mi) walk from Industrial Parkway even thought most of the park is within that air distance.    This kind of situation got built all the time.

The little bridge at the southern tip of the park obviously changes everything.  Now, most of the park has a reasonable direct walk path to a stop on Industrial Parkway.  That's better mobility for the people who live there, for access to nearby commercial as well as to transit.   I point to this bridge because it's the kind of small intervention that cities and local transit advocates should be looking for.  It doesn't have to be a street, of course, just a pedestrian link.  Such links can do a great deal to re-connect highly disconnected suburban street patterns, and thus bring much larger areas into the walk radius of transit.  

To see the effect of an abundance of these links, here's a slice of Australia's sprawling national capital city, Canberra.  Even in the most car-dominated and sprawl-loving era, Canberra has always maintaned an ethos of connection to nature, and has manifested this in abundant park strips -- most of them also off-street bicycle paths -- lacing the city.  These paths completely change the game.  Here's a bit of the Canberra district of Florey, designed in the 1970s.  It's at the same scale as the slice of Hayward above.

The east-west arterial across this image is a very important street for the transit system.  In fact, our Strategic Plan for Canberra's public transit identified it as a bus rapid transit corridor.  RIght now, it's a big fast arterial, but notice that as it turns into a transit corridor, its stops will have very easy access into the surrounding suburban fabric, even though that fabric is made of classic car-oriented design.  The key is that while there are plenty of cul-de-sacs, they are almost always "pierced" by a pedestrian link that allows people to keep walking in a desired direction.   Zooming in, you can see these links into the parkway corridor from each of the cul-de-sacs at the top of the image:

 

In short, this structure is a labyrinth for cars, as cul-de-sacs are meant to be, but for pedestrians and cyclists it's more like a grid.  Every city should be looking for places where they can retrofit this sort of pedestrian connection.

environmentalist critiques of strategic transit planning

How should environmenalists engage with long-range transit planning studies?  What should you focus on?  What should you object to?

long term transit plans: asking the real questions

For the last two years I've been working on a Strategic Public Transport Network Plan for Australia's national capital, Canberra, so I'm happy to report that the plan has now been released for public comment.  The concise Executive Summary pulls together a number of key ideas about long-term transit planning that I've found useful in many cities, so even if you don't know or care about Canberra you might find it interesting.

The most important single idea in the plan (as in much of my long-term planning work) is the Frequent Network, which consists of services that will run every 15 minutes or better all day, every day of the week.  This is the level of service that can motivate people to choose a transit-dependent lifestyle, because it assures you of the ability to get around without building your life around schedules. The proposed Frequent Network includes Rapid service (red lines in this image, stopping at "stations" every 1 km or so, averaging 40 km/hour) and Local service (orange, stopping every 200-400m, averaging 20 km/hour).   (As always, click image to enlarge.)

The plan is intentionally silent on questions of bus vs. rail.  The red lines on this map could eventually be light rail, and the orange lines could even be trams (streetcars).  The crucial point is that long-term planning must proceed without waiting for those decisions.  The point of identifying the Frequent Network over 20 years in advance is so that land use planning and development can start to respond to it. Ultimately, the adopted version of this map should be the authority on future service not just for the transit agency, but also for the land use agency, social service agencies, and ultimately for anyone who makes a decision about where to locate anything.  The long-term message is simple:  If you want really good transit service, locate on the Frequent Network.  If good transit isn't important to you, locate somewhere else.

In the public consultation period now beginning, we're asking the public three really hard but really important questions:

• Where should the Frequent Network be?  We've drafted a network based on current and planned patterns of density, and we're asking if the proposed network is in the right places.  But this question comes with a warning: the Frequent Network a necessary conditions for increased urban density.  If you live in a low-density suburb and you really don't want more density there, you probably DON'T want the Frequent Network!
• How much should be spent on service to low-density suburbs where ridership will always be low?  Such service meets a different set of goals based on the severity of needs met, rather than the number of people who need it.  These "social inclusion goals," such as basic mobility for senior, disabled, and low-income persons who live in these low-density areas, are prominent in the community but expensive to serve given the low ridership those services achieve.  (A professional paper of mine on this crucial topic is here.)  So we need some direction on how much should be spent on those services, because that spending meets social goals but not environmental ones.  (You could also ask this question the opposite way:  "What percentage of our services should be devoted totally to the goal of high ridership?")
• How much should service grow overall?  The draft plan increases service by about 50% per citizen over 20 years.  We're asking whether that sounds like too much or not enough, because ultimately, the subsidy for that growth will need to come from the government, and thus from the public.  

What I'm trying to do in constructing these questions is separate technical thinking from value judgments. The three questions above have no technical answer because they are questions about what the community wants and values. As a planner my role is to ask those questions but not express my own values on them, and I recommend that the local transit staff take the same view. However, the questions are technically framed; I've constructed them so that when the community answers them through its elected officials, that answer can actually be implemented. 

This is an important difference from many of the "visioning" processes that are often used to elicit a community's desires and hopes. Such processes often seek consensus by steering away from the hardest choices that need to be made, while my goal is to steer right into them. 

One of the main reasons that skilled and talented people leave the transit industry is the impossibility of meeting conflicting political demands.   For example, I've actually seen cases where elected leaders told a transit agency to cut service on high-ridership route A in order to add new service to low-ridership rural area B, and then complained to staff when that change caused total ridership to go down. Obviously, if you move a service from a high-density area to a rural area, you should expect exactly that result. These hard-but-important questions are designed to elicit direction about the real choices that transit requires us to make, so that talented staff feel supported and encouraged as they follow that direction in building and operating the transit system.

(Frequent Network map by Transit Graphics.)